Toronto plays host to one of the largest Pride events in North America, and this year the world is coming to join the celebration as WorldPride, a 10-day festival across the GTA, kicks off June 20.

From the first Pride in 1971 to the first same-sex weddings in 2001, here is a look at some of the key moments in the city’s queer history.

Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives

1971: First Toronto Pride

Before the first Dyke March (1996) made space
specifically for queer women, before the first Blockorama
(1998) staked out the role of Black and Caribbean LBGTQ
communities, before the first Trans March (2009) – there
was the first Pride. While the official anniversary is
recorded in 1981, in fact the first celebration in Toronto
was held on Aug. 1, 1971 with a picnic at Hanlan’s Point.
Organized by the Community Homophile Association of Toronto
and Toronto Gay Action, it brought together 300 celebrants
with flags and banners, including a lace tablecloth banner
proclaiming: “Canada the True, North, and Gay.”

File

1977: Emanuel Jaques

On Aug. 1, 1977, police found the body of a 12-year-old
shoeshine boy named Emanuel Jaques on the roof of a body
rub parlour on Yonge Street across from the then-new Eaton
Centre. He had been raped and murdered. The crime mobilized
what became known as the Shoeshine Boy Protests and ignited
a push for the cleanup of the Yonge Street strip’s sex
industry. Although the men eventually convicted had little
connection to the local gay community, their crimes were
widely described in the press as a homosexual killing and
created a backlash, with a petition circulating within days
headed: “Stamp Out Gays and Body Rubs.”

“Reports on the murder tend to emphasize that
homosexuals were involved. … It links in people’s minds
that this is homosexual activity,” warned George Hislop,
director of the Community Homophile Association and the
object of death threats when the story broke.

David Rasmus

1979: Buddies in Bad Times
Theatre

Buddies, as it is affectionately known, is the largest
and longest-running queer theatre company in the world. It
was founded by Sky Gilbert, Matt Walsh, and Jerry
Ciccoritti, and over the years it has nurtured Canadian
artists such as Ann-Marie MacDonald, Atom Egoyan, Daniel
MacIvor, Pretty Porky and Pissed Off, R. Kelly Clipperton,
and Kitty Neptune. The theatre is, in its own words,
“unapologetically political, fiercely pro-sexual, and
fundamentally anti-establishment.” Its company has produced
many award-winning plays; it has also hosted sex dungeon
parties and club nights – it is truly a unique queer
Toronto institution.

Jack Dobson / The Globe and Mail

1980: George Hislop runs for city
council

George Hislop was a pioneering activist who organized
the first gay rights demonstration on Parliament Hill,
founded the Community Homophile Association of Toronto and
was the champion who won survivor pension benefits for gays
and lesbians. Mr. Hislop was also the first out LGBT person
to run for City Hall in the country and the first LGBT
candidate for any political office in Ontario. He beat out
Jack Layton for a nomination for city councillor, but was
ultimately defeated by Dan Heap.

Tibor Kolley / The Globe and Mail

1981 and 2000: The bathhouse
raids

On Feb. 5, 1981, in a raid called “Operation Soap,”
Toronto police officers surged through bathhouses in the
Gay Village, smashing doors with crowbars and sledgehammers
and hurling epithets at the citizens they were rounding up.
The resulting arrest of more than 300 men was the largest
mass arrest in Canada since the 1970 October Crisis. But
where the queer community had uneasily tolerated police
interference in the past, these raids marked a turning
point for the community – the beginning of a nation-wide
LGBT rights movement that was inspired by previous
civil-rights and liberation movements.

Eighteen years later, but grounded very much in the
sexual and political ideals that sprang from the 1981
protests, queer women began to hold semi-annual bathhouse
events in Toronto. On Sept. 15, 2000, police officers
raided the fourth of these events. When the women-only
party was in full swing, five male police officers,
allegedly checking for liquor violations, spent more than
an hour searching the multilevel complex. There were 355
participants, in varying states of undress gathered at the
time. The resulting legal complaint by some of the
bathhouse organizers resulted in Justice Peter Hryn staying
the charges against two of the organizers and comparing the
officers’ entry into the club to a strip search. The police
were forced to pay $350,000, issue an apology from the five
officers who conducted the raid, and a commitment from the
force to beef up sensitivity training for its 7,260
members.

Thomas Szlukovenyi / The Globe and Mail

1988: AIDS Action Now!

AIDS Action Now! was the brainchild of legendary
scholar, gay-rights activist and former ACT chair Michael
Lynch. From the first signs of the epidemic, Mr. Lynch was
writing for The Body Politic, urging the gay community to
protest and wage all-out campaigns against a glacially slow
response from a government that saw this as a “gay
disease.” By the mid-1980s, AIDS Action Now! dedicated
itself to direct action, pushing for access to experimental
drugs and anonymous testing, denouncing government inaction
on AIDS (Brian Mulroney was a favourite target), and
demanding access to health care for HIV-positive prisoners.
Today, with treatment widely available in no small part
thanks to AIDS Action Now!’s early work, the group focuses
on new forms of discrimination, such as
HIV-non-disclosure.

Tibor Kolley / The Globe and Mail

1994: Defeat of Bill 167

Ontario’s first gay and lesbian rights bill would have
provided most of the same rights enjoyed by heterosexual
couples in the province, extending employment, inheritance
and insurance benefits to same-sex counterparts. Introduced
on May 19, it narrowly passed first reading, but was
defeated on second reading on June 9, by a vote of 68-59
when Liberal opposition leader Lynn MacLeod, who had first
supported the bill, voted against it. When the bill was
defeated, LGBT activists in the gallery protested and were
ejected by OPP officers who had donned latex gloves. At
that summer’s Pride March, parade-goers staged the largest
LGBT political action in Canadian history – 50,000 marchers
wrapping a pink ribbon and forming a human chain around the
legislative assembly.

File

1998: Mayor Mel marches

Leather men whooped, topless women waved and drag queens
blew kisses at him. Mayor Mel Lastman, the millionaire
senior from the suburbs, was the unlikely star of the 1998
Pride Parade. “I cannot justify saying I’m the mayor of all
the people in Toronto if I don’t participate. How can I
walk in one parade and not walk in another one?” Mr.
Lastman asked before the march. Doug Kerr, WorldPride Human
Rights Conference co-chair, saw this as a symbolic turning
point for the city: “LGBT communities had overwhelmingly
supported [Barbara] Hall in 1997, the first
post-amalgamation election. That Lastman, a suburban
somewhat conservative-ish old guy who didn’t get our votes,
would join the downtown queers in their parade sent a
positive message across the city and maybe even the country
… I remember thinking that we were turning a corner towards
a more inclusive city.”

Robin Woodward

2000-2006: The Vazaleen dance
parties

For six years, hedonistic, political and
community-oriented revellers came together under one “army
of lovers” banner at Vazaleen (later changed after
copyright infringement cautions) dance parties, primarily
at Lee’s Palace.

The creation of artist/activist Will Munro, his vision
was to rip out the stitches that bordered LGBTQ
communities. Before Vazaleen, it was rare for queer event
to transgress the Church-Wellesley Gay Village, or mix
ages, genders, sex, orientation, political ideologies, and
music genres. “Everything I do in nightlife is a critique
of mainstream gay nightlife,” Mr. Munro said in a 2003
interview. Vazaleen featured a dizzying number of acts
while showcasing some of the best emerging talent of the
era: The Hidden Cameras and Peaches owe their early
exposure to Vazaleen.

Andy Clark / Reuters

Jan. 14, 2001: Same-sex
weddings

With 850 spectators, including 60 representatives of the
media, and tight security, Rev. Brent Hawkes of the
Metropolitan Community Church presided over a double
same-sex wedding of Elaine and Anne Vautour and Kevin
Bourassa and Joe Varnell. Defying assault by a woman who
jumped up from a front pew, Mr. Hawkes married the same-sex
couples by using the Marriages Act, which stipulates that a
marriage licence can be issued if the banns are published
on three successive Sundays without anyone raising a valid
objection (in fact there were objections from conservative
Christians on the second and third occasions, but they did
not site legal reasons). There were other cases before the
courts that were brought forward by individuals, but
Metropolitan was the first church in Canada to seek the
ability to marry its congregants through the banns. “A
same-sex marriage simply doesn’t meet the definition and as
such we’re not going to be certifying it,” said Ontario
Registrar-General Bob Runciman in response to the
registering of the weddings. This initiative, in a
Riverdale church, was a key contribution in the early fight
that would pave the way toward legalizing same-sex marriage
in Canada.